Advertise With Us
Reaching our readers
AKRON SCORE is free to read because advertising pays for the reporting, and we are glad to work with advertisers who want to reach an engaged, international, news-reading audience. This page explains what we sell, how we sell it, and the rules that come with buying space here. Those rules are not fine print. They are the terms on which the newsroom stays independent, and they are not negotiable.
To start a conversation, write to support@akronscore.org with ADVERTISING at the front of the subject line. Tell us what you want to achieve and we will tell you honestly whether we are a good fit, because a campaign that does not suit our audience wastes your money and our goodwill.
What we offer
Most of our inventory is standard display advertising, filled programmatically through the exchanges, with viewability and fraud measurement built in. We also sell a limited amount directly, including newsletter placements and, occasionally, clearly labelled sponsored content. We keep the ad load deliberately lighter than we could, because a page buried in advertising drives readers away and takes your impressions with them.
Direct buyers get a straightforward account of what a placement involves: where it sits, what it typically delivers, and what it does not. We do not inflate numbers or dress up a metric to close a deal. If a format is not working for your goal, we will say so rather than sell you more of it.
The wall between advertising and the newsroom
This is the part that matters most, so we put it plainly. Buying advertising on AKRON SCORE buys you space and attention. It does not buy you coverage, and it does not buy you protection from coverage. Our reporting decisions are made entirely by the newsroom, with no input from advertisers and no advance sight of stories.
Concretely: no advertiser is shown an article before it publishes. No advertiser is promised a favourable story or a mention. If your company becomes the subject of a story, we report it as we would report any other, and the fact that you advertise with us will not soften it, delay it, or make it disappear. If that is a problem for your organisation, we are not the right publication for your budget. How this fits together with our funding is on our ownership and funding page, and the wider newsroom rules are in our editorial standards.
Sponsored content, labelled as such
We accept a limited amount of sponsored content, and we label it as sponsored, clearly and at the top, so no reader can mistake it for our journalism. It will not be designed to imitate a news report, it will not carry a reporter’s byline as though the newsroom produced it, and it will not borrow the authority of our reporting to sell something. If a proposed piece can only work by pretending to be editorial, we will not run it.
The same honesty applies to any affiliate arrangements in our own content, which are disclosed to readers where they appear. Transparency is not a favour we do reluctantly; it is the condition on which sponsored formats are allowed to exist here at all.
What we will not run
Some advertising we decline regardless of the fee. The list is not exhaustive, and we reserve the final judgement, but it reliably includes the following.
- Advertising that is deceptive, including creative made to look like one of our articles, fake headlines, and phoney countdowns or system warnings.
- Scams, fraudulent schemes, and get-rich-quick or miracle-cure claims of the kind that prey on readers.
- Political advertising that hides who is paying for it, and any attempt to place undisclosed campaign material as ordinary inventory.
- Malware, auto-redirects, cryptojacking, and anything that hijacks the reader’s device or browser.
- Hateful, harassing or illegal content, and advertising that targets or exploits children.
- Creative that has no business next to a serious news story, which we judge case by case.
If a campaign slips through the exchanges that should have been caught by these rules, tell us at support@akronscore.org and we will block it. Programmatic systems are large and imperfect, and reader reports are one of the best ways we keep the bad creative out.
How to work with us
Send your enquiry to support@akronscore.org with ADVERTISING in the subject, a short description of your product or message, your goal, and your rough budget and timing. Advertising is handled on the business side, away from the desk that would cover you, and speaking to us about a campaign gives you no line into the newsroom. We will come back with what we can offer and what we cannot. What data our advertising partners collect, and how readers control it, is set out in our privacy policy and our cookie policy.
Last updated: August 2026
